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I am writing a small web site for work where employees can consult video capsules on how to use the different programs that we use. I was asked to organize the videos by categories and the categories need to be arbitrarily nested.

I've been looking into two ways to model this: nested sets and adjacency lists. They both seem to have their ups and downs, and I was wondering if somebody could help me choose the model that would best fit my usage scenario.

  • I want to display the categories in a menu along with the number of videos under that category
  • The site will be updated once a week, if that. The majority of the database activity is going to be reading.
  • The site will not be heavily visited. Never more than 2-3 users at once I'd expect.
  • Categories are likely going to be established when we build the site and rarely (if ever) touched afterwards. Maybe some categories will be added, but I don't expected categories to be deleted or moved around in the tree.
  • This is a summer job, so I expect that somebody else will maintain the site after I'm gone.

Thank you for you help.

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For what database? Some have recursive/hierarchical query support, while others (MySQL) do not -- this can impact design. –  OMG Ponies May 24 '11 at 3:21

2 Answers 2

up vote 1 down vote

If it's a small lightly used database that's unlikely to see a lot of change....I wouldn't sweat the issue. Don't spend a lot of time thinking on it: just do it in the simplest, most straightforward, easiest to understand/implement manner.

Git'er done, as they say.

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I would agree with @Nicholas. Since reading is your main activity, answer would also depend upon where would you be accessing this from - SQL stored proc or .NET/C# library? BTW: do spend some time exploring options, an incorrect design will impact performance drastically - specially in hierarchical data. –  YetAnotherUser May 19 '11 at 18:48
    
@YetAnotherUser: I'm using PHP and MySQL. As for exploring options, that's what I've been doing; Since the size of the database is small, and likely to remain small, I would definitely consider doing things naively (i.e. loading everything in RAM and using PHP to arrange the data) at the cost of decreased performance because it wouldn't be noticeable. –  gnuvince May 19 '11 at 19:00
up vote 0 down vote 
category
--------
category_id
name

category_nesting
----------------
parent_category_id
child_category_id

video
-------
video_id
more_stuff

video_category
--------------
video_id
category_id
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